The Proviso (97 page)

Love me, Knox, please.

Knox took a deep breath and said, “Probably not,
Iustitia. I need to—” He stopped. Cleared his throat. Wouldn’t look
at her. “Um, probably not.”

Justice raised her eyebrow as she watched him, and
she pulled in a long, soft breath. Oh! It wasn’t about Justice’s
readiness at all; it was about his, and suddenly, she felt yet
another heavy weight lift from her shoulders. The weekends
alone—
not
about her. With her curiosity bursting inside her
so violently it nearly hurt, she only said, “Okay.”

Knox offered to clean up, so she went into her—well,
their—bedroom to blog. No hamlet. She swallowed and gritted her
teeth, trying to keep the tears at bay. It’d been a month and a
half. He wasn’t going to come back.

At ten, she heard the driveway gate open and watched
out the mullioned window as his SUV backed out and drove away. She
didn’t have to wonder where he went at night. The evidence was all
over the courthouse every morning: the dozen or so discarded orange
juice bottles; files that hadn’t been signed off on the evening
before but were come morning; prosecution tables that had been
clean the night before but grew exhibits overnight.

Justice closed her laptop then, not having the
stomach for more words. She wandered into the kitchen to get
something to drink and saw an old yellowed newspaper on the kitchen
table that hadn’t been there before.

It was dated August 30, 1994, and in the middle of
the page was a picture of a very, very young, though no less hard
and cold, Knox Hilliard as he walked into the courthouse. The
headline next to the picture read “Prosecutor not charged in
slaying.”

Assistant Chouteau County prosecutor Knox Hilliard,
25, was cleared today in the execution-style murder of Tom Parley,
43, after Parley was acquitted of 19 counts of homicide over the
course of three years.

Hilliard, who prosecuted Parley for serial murder,
was the lead suspect in the FBI’s investigation, but federal
prosecutor John Riley cited lack of any credible evidence linking
Hilliard to the murder. “Our investigation has taken us in another
direction,” said Riley.

Hilliard, who has been on administrative leave from
the prosecutor’s office while under investigation, returned to work
today. When asked for comments, he said only: “It was a gross
miscarriage of justice and my only regret is that I wasn’t able to
convince a jury of Parley’s guilt. I offer my heartfelt apologies
to the people of Chouteau County and the state of Missouri for not
doing my job well enough.”

There was more. Justice didn’t bother to read it;
she knew what it said. She threw it in the trash and sighed, a tear
rolling down her cheek. “Oh, Knox,” she whispered. “I’m so
sorry.”

She went to bed and stared out the mullioned windows
at the fractured moonlight. Her age. He’d been her age, just out of
law school. So much she hadn’t wanted to believe about her husband,
so much she didn’t know . . . His pain, his joys—if he had any
left. A man who loved to surf more than anything in the world
living sixteen hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean.

You’re an AP in a backwater county on the outskirts
of Cowtown. Why? Is what you wanted in any way similar to the
reality?

So. Giselle’s question to Justice at the beginning
of her journey with Knox applied no less to Knox himself.

None of this had figured in her girlish fantasies;
she had thought nothing of who he was as a man, a man with almost
forty years of life already behind him, a man who apparently didn’t
have much to laugh about at all, a man with no joy behind that
radiant smile he used as a weapon in court, a man who hurt and bled
more than most.

Knox Hilliard: Not the most powerful force in the
universe. Who knew?

A semi-professional surfer who had come home to
spend his best years fighting for an inheritance he didn’t want but
felt honor-bound to claim because of the lives it had cost.

Dog jumped up on the bed, and she held onto him,
unable to sleep. It was 12:30 when she heard Knox come in the
house. She listened as he threw his keys on the table, opened the
refrigerator door, poured a glass of orange juice (she didn’t have
to see him to know what he’d chosen to drink), then silence. After
a minute she heard the rustling of a trash bag and the crackle of
an old newspaper, then the opening of the basement door and
footsteps clipping down the stairs. She heard the water run when he
turned on the shower in the basement bathroom, then heard it stop a
bit later.

At 1:15, she threw the bedcovers back and padded
down the hallway, to the basement door and down the stairs. She
came to a halt behind the couch where Knox lay, on his side, clad
only in his short cycling shorts, asleep in the light from Wakko,
Yakko, and Dot’s world.

Justice stood and watched him, as she had before. He
looked so very young, so innocent as he lay with his head on his
outstretched arm, his hand still clutching the newspaper. She took
the remote off the arm of the couch and clicked off the television,
then touched his muscled shoulder.

“Knox.”

His eyes fluttered open and he turned his head to
look up at her. “Iustitia?”

“Come to bed.”

She sensed his flicker of surprise, but she only
turned and walked back upstairs.

The clock had marked thirty minutes before she felt
the cool wash of air on her back, and the depression of two hundred
pounds of raw male muscle on the bed. She heard the soft thud of
four paws on the floor and the baritone voice she loved say, “Go
away, Dog.”

Justice smiled a little when Knox’s arm curled
around her waist and pulled her gently into the curve of his body.
She felt his face burrow into her curls that lay on her pillow.

“I murdered that man, Iustitia,” he murmured, as if
she didn’t know, hadn’t known for three years, hadn’t deliberately
blocked it out of her mind.

Daring more than she had ever dared before, she
reached behind her and spread her hand over Knox’s thigh, stroked
slowly upward to his jersey-covered hip, and squeezed.

“I know.”

They were silent for a long time. Then, “I made him
get on his knees and put his hands behind his head,” he said, his
voice gathering strength and Justice understood that though this
was a confession, it was far from an apology. “I put my gun between
his eyes and I made him beg for his life. Then I blew his head
off.”

Justice was very aware of his chest against her
back, his ragged breathing, the thundering pace of his heart as he
awaited her condemnation—if not for what he’d done, then that he
felt no remorse.

“Well,” she sighed. “It needed done.”

He froze for a second then took a deep breath,
released it slowly. His breathing and heart rate eased. His hand
drifted across her cheek and into her hair, and Justice felt safe
and protected for the first time since her grandfather died.

* * * * *

89:
HAPPY PAPER TRAILS

“I don’t know what to do, Justice. I mean, I just
can’t seem to make my paycheck stretch all the way to the next
payday. So when I get the next paycheck, half of it’s already
spent. Alisha’s medical bills are paid, but her medicine is sky
high. I mean, if I could get a night job or something—just to pay
the bills that overlap, get some of them paid off, maybe.”

Justice nodded in understanding, her mouth full of a
bite of the burger she’d bought. She took a sip of strawberry
shake. “I know what you mean about the bills. A farm’s always like
that. We were always almost barely hanging on.” She paused. “Tell
me something, Richard. How come you’re not interested in the
widow’n’orphan fund?”

He snorted and stuffed a French fry in his mouth.
“Are you kidding? I see all that money come through here and
sometimes morals don’t mean a damn thing—especially in the
beginning, when Claude was the prosecutor. There’ve been times
when, you know, Davidson will toss me a bundle and I’ll look at it
and think of all the things five thousand dollars would buy that my
kids need. Shoot, even if they didn’t need anything, it’d be nice
to buy my wife a huge diamond ring just because she deserves
it.”

“So what keeps you from taking it?”

He shook his head and he stared at his food. He
looked up at Justice. “I don’t know, Justice. Sometimes I just
really don’t know.” His gaze didn’t stray from hers and her eyes
flickered in question. “What keeps you from doing it?”

She shrugged. “What’s the point in that? I get to
keep my whole paycheck and my other earnings. Knox pays for
everything, probably with that money. I don’t have to clean or do
laundry or mow the lawn or fix stuff around the house. He gives me
money for the things we need and he’d give me more if I asked. I
have all the time in the world to write and for the first time in
my life, I’m accountable to no one. If I wanted that kind of money,
I’d take a radio show. So . . . I just don’t feel a need to. But,”
she went on, slowly so as to make her point as clearly as possible
without saying it outright, “if nobody knows where it comes from,
how do you know it’s hot
?”

Richard looked up at her then, and sat back in his
chair. “Justice, I never fixed cases when Claude was here, but that
wasn’t his only racket. There are a dozen illegal things he could
be doing. Where else could it come from?”

“Think about it. We presume people to be
innocent—well, no, we really don’t, but that’s the theory. But even
if we don’t think they are, we still have to prove it beyond a
reasonable doubt. So until you can tell me where it comes from, why
it’s hot, I’m not going to assume anything.”

“Justice, I’m telling you. This office has always
worked this way.”

“Oh, okay. Then what do
you
think he’s
doing?”

Richard said nothing for a long while, then, slowly,
“Knox hated Claude. He didn’t bring a dime into this office.”

“Did Patrick?”

“No, nor Hicks. I remember when Knox came here. He
latched onto Hicks, but all three of us were good at hiding what we
were not doing.”

“And you’re still not. I mean, everyone who puts his
hand in the till has to contribute. That’s the way a widow’n’orphan
fund usually works, right?”

He stared at her. “Are you saying it’s all Knox’s
money and he’s just . . .
giving
. . . it away?”

“Follow the money. There’s only one reason the FBI
wouldn’t be able to find a paper trail and that’s if there wasn’t a
paper trail at all. Knox is the best white-collar prosecutor in the
state. He would know how to hide money in plain sight.”

“He can’t possibly make that kind of cash here.”

“With Sebastian Taight managing it?”

Richard’s eyes widened. “I always forget about
that.” He looked around the room at the men milling about, yelling
as always, turning the air blue. “They’ve already figured it out,”
he murmured.

“Right. And they’re willing to play whatever game
Knox has on the table, especially because it involves free money.
The residents? It only matters what they think insofar as they
spread the rumors of the nefarious goings-on in the Chouteau County
prosecutor’s office far and wide, initiated by the thirty-year
reign of Claude Nocek.”

He sighed. “Now
I
feel stupid.”

“Don’t. Occam’s Razor.”

“The simplest solution tends to be the right
one.”

“Right. The simplest explanation is that the office
is still on the take somehow because it always was and that Knox is
just better at hiding it than Nocek was. No one just gives money
away, especially with no strings attached and on such a sustained
basis. Second, it’s just an invisible part of your life, like
breathing. You’ve never contributed and you’re so used to it being
here, so used to abstaining, you wouldn’t notice unless it stopped.
Third, you’ve got so many worries on your mind, I’d have been
surprised if you had enough room in your brain to give it more than
a passing thought. You have a very sick wife and active teenage
kids. You’re constantly running. I only figured it out because I
live with Knox and I see another side of him that nobody else sees.
I have the time and the silence to think about it. If I didn’t have
that, I’d still think it was hot, too, the way I’m
supposed
to.”

“Thanks, Justice,” he sighed as he arose to clean up
his lunch mess and go to the restroom. She could tell he was
distressed by not only the idea that he hadn’t picked up on it like
the others had, but by the fact that he’d missed out on all that
cash trying to be honorable.

Justice sat and contemplated the wall, her chin in
her hand, chewing on Richard’s situation and how she might help
him.

“Why’d you tell him that?”

She started as Knox’s low growl sounded behind her.
She looked over her shoulder at him and her belly did a little flip
when she took in his lithe bigness and golden darkness. She’d ached
for him to make love to her every night for the last week as he’d
slept curled up around her. But it was her own fault. All she had
to do was turn over and kiss him and she just couldn’t work up the
nerve.

“Why not?” she asked after a minute of staring at
him. “He needs the money more than anyone here and you could’ve
just taken him aside and told him, instead of letting him think he
was doing the honorable thing at the cost of his family’s welfare.
Why do you always do things the hard way?”

He paused for a moment and looked at her, an odd
expression on his face. “How did you figure it out?” he finally
asked.

She swiveled in her chair to face him, relaxed, her
elbows on the arms of it and her fingers steepled. “Knox. I realize
that your lasting impression of me is that mousy little girl her
first week in law school, and that’s what you see when you look at
me, and that’s what you’re always going to see. What you don’t know
is that now, three years later, my name and my opinion have some
meaning in the world. If you’d paid attention while I was in law
school or read my CV, you’d know that, but apparently you didn’t
pay attention and you still haven’t read my CV. I didn’t make
summa cum laude
and a name for myself by being stupid.”